Ballerina Language with Tyler Jewell

Modern programming requires lots of integration between APIs. Some of these integrations are trivial–such as using Twilio or Stripe. But there are many more complex integrations.

For example, when a large company acquires a smaller company, the acquiring company might want to integrate with that smaller company to leverage the synergies between the two companies. How do you build clean communication patterns between the services of one company and another?

Two teams within a single enterprise can also have integration issues. One team might have a different data model than the other team. One team might be using JSON and the other using XML. In these cases, integrations between APIs can take considerable time.

Ballerina is a programming language that is designed for writing integrations. Ballerina is made for building services that allow two APIs to communicate easily–in contrast to other patterns of API integration such as those involving an enterprise service bus.

Tyler Jewell is the CEO of WSO2, a company that specializes in integrations. WSO2 created the Ballerina language and is investing heavily into it (with ~80 people working on Ballerina today). In this episode we explored integrations–and why this problem required creating a new programming language.

BallerinaCon is July 18th in San Francisco and our listeners can attend for free–use code BalCon-SEDaily.

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